Roger M. Wilcox's capsule review of

Galactic Starfire (4th Edition)

Starfire began in 1979 as a simple, fast-playing game of starship
combat. Its original micro-pouch edition, published by Task Force Games, cost
about US$5 and featured about 10 pages of rules and 20 pages of scenarios.
Ship display sheets were painfully simple, with each starship capable of being
represented by a single line of text, like so:

Endeavor DD (2) SSSAAHWILWIWIIII(6)

Endeavor was the ship's name. DD is the modern-naval abbreviation for a
Destroyer. The (2) represented its Turn Mode, i.e. how many hexagons the ship
had to move forward before it could make a 60 degree turn. Each S was a
shield, each A was a unit of armor, the H was a cargo hold, each W was a
gun/missile "weapon" launcher, each I was an ion engine, and the L was a laser.
The (6) was just a quick summary of how many ion engines the starship had, and
thus how fast it was -- a ship could move as many hexagons per turn as it had
engines.

Each ship was assumed to be able to run all of its systems at full power every
turn. Missiles and gun shells were in unlimited supply. If a ship was hit by
enemy weapons and took damage, letters on its line of text would get crossed
off from left to right, one letter for each damage point, so that after taking
7 damage points the Endeavor would look like this:

Endeavor DD (2) xxxxxxxILWIWIIII(6)

As you could imagine, designing your own ships was trivially easy. You put your
shields and armor and cargo holds on the left, so that they'd get destroyed
before your critical systems did, and then you packed whatever useful systems
you could afford to buy into the remaining "hull" space. Each system had a cost
in "megacredits," for purposes of game balance, and a size in hull spaces.
(Engines cost more megacredits and took up more hull spaces the bigger the ship
they were installed in.) If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even use
"Tech Levels" to indicate whether a particular system was available for
building into your ship or not — e.g., missile launchers were available
at Tech Level 1, but force beams did not become available until Tech Level 4.
Starships from different races could meet each other and have big space battles
thanks to the existence of naturally-occurring "warp points" that linked star
systems together.

It was an exceedingly simple, elegant system.

The problem was, the designers couldn't leave it alone.

They added high-speed Fighters and Carriers reminiscent of Battlestar
Galactica (Starfire II). They added captial-ship missiles, which had to be
kept track of individually, and an incredibly complex strategic campaigning
system (Starfire III: Empires). They changed the fighter rules (Strikefighter)
and tried to integrate them more cleanly into the main Starfire rules (Starfire
2nd Edition) but ended up throwing in more "goodies" like antimatter warheads
and HAWK missiles and the need to keep track of all missiles, capital or
otherwise, so that overall the system became more complicated, not less.
They re-issued the strategic rules (Starfire New Empires) and added a new tech
level. They revamped the main Starfire rules again (Starfire 3rd
Edition) and, when it came time to reissue the again-revamped strategic rules
(Imperial Starfire), they added more new systems and changed existing ones.
They issued scenario packets that added new systems (Alkelda Dawn's jump
engines, intertial sinks, and kinetic weapons being the most notorious). They
revamped the main Starfire rules yet again (Starfire 3rd Edition Revised) and
in so doing, as an almost throwaway notion, cut the game-scale size of a
hexagon at the tactical level in half from 150,000 km to 75,000 km — the
first change to the tactical-level game scale since the micro-pouch edition was
first introduced.

I was hoping that this new 4th Edition would streamline all the latest tweaks
to the rules into one great, glorious, unified whole, far easier to pick up for
a new player and far easier to master for the serious wargamer. Instead, the
opposite happened. A whole new system of "tech trees" was introduced,
completely doing away with the old Tech Level system. Description of each
weapon's effects (normal, ignore shields, ignore armor, ignore shields
and armor, etc.) are spread out over several places in the rules. The
combat tables have been removed from the main rulebook and sequestered away in
the "Space Master's Guide." The tech tree descriptions associated with the new
and far-more-plentiful systems are almost impossible to read, and there are
misplaced sentences that make the reading even more confusing. Improved
shields, which used to be far more efficient than composite armor, are now far
less efficient than composite armor, despite the fact that they still
cost more megacredits. A new more-regular-than-before system of lower-case
postscript (or subscript) letters signifies the generation and size and
capabilities of each weapon system variant — and there are a lot
of weapon variants.

And nowhere is there a table summarizing the different kinds of missiles, or
the different kinds of missile launchers (there are many), or the different
kinds of lasers or force beams or energy beams, or the different kinds of
anything else.

No one picking up the new Galactic Starfire rules for the first time would be
able to just start playing. No old Starfire veteran could hope to learn the new
system from these new books, to the point where he could play with even
mediocre competentce, in anything less than several days. This once-simple
space combat system has now become horrendously — and, dare I say,
needlessly — complicated. You might as well be playing Star Fleet
Battles. Which, I might add, was made by the same company that used to make
Starfire when Starfire was still a simple, easy game.